This About That:This will not end well, because accidents happen, and amateur astronauts aren't a good risk.

In one way I agree. The LAST farking thing we need is another Christa McAuliffe to shut down space exploration for another 40 years, and that wasn't even by her own choice!

On the other hand, MAYBE if we as a society come to the realization that some people think death is a perfectly acceptable risk, we'd get past our obstructive hand-wringing over certain jobs (and not others, depending on how public the death is, because we're weeeeird). There are quite a few astronauts that have stated that a one-way trip would be fine with them. That's not even covering the thousands of non-astronauts that say the same thing.

The loss of astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee didn't stop the Apollo program. The loss of teacher McAuliffe had a much bigger effect. The loss of a game show tourist could end space exploration for a long time. But really, none of that is what is holding up space exploration now. It's frightened, anti-intellectual, cheap Authoritarians.

Would the type of person who makes a good reality show contestant (with the consequent desire to be on the show in the first place) be able to stand up to the psychological testing required of astronauts?

Something tells me all those petty broken minds scrambling to find knives which which to stab each other in the back on TV will not mix well with the precision and duress of space flight training.